Ancient Rape Cultures

Sexual Violence in the Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Early Christian World

Pyy, Elina (ed.)

In the past thirty years, the study of gender-based violence has established itself as a legitimate course of inquiry in the field of Classics and Ancient History. While pioneering studies touching upon the theme were already written in the 1970s and the 1980s,1 a particularly crucial period for “ancient rape studies” was the 1990s – an important decade for the development of ancient gender studies as a whole. In the aftermath of second-wave feminism and in the grip of the “postfeminist” cultural shift, numerous scholars, in particular in the Anglo-American research sphere, started asking questions about the intimate connection between sexuality, power, and violence in the ancient sources and societies.